Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations

by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N. T. di Giovanni)

  He left two daughters, of which the younger, María Justina, is the one who concerns us.

  Toward the end of 1853, the Colonel’s widow and his daughters settled in Buenos Aires. They never got back their lands, which had been confiscated by the dictator during the Colonel’s long absence, but the memory of those miles and miles of lost acres on which they had never laid eyes survived in the family for many years. At the age of seventeen, María Justina married the physician Bernado Jáuregui, who, though a civilian, fought during the civil wars in the battles of Pavón and Cepeda, and later died practicing his profession during the yellow-fever epidemic of the eighteen-seventies. He left a son and two daughters. Mariano, the firstborn, was a customs inspector, and he used to frequent the National Library and National Archives, with the intention of compiling an exhaustive life of the hero, his grandfather, which he never finished and perhaps never began. The older daughter, María Elvira, married a cousin, a Saavedra, who was employed in the Ministry of Finance. Julia, the second daughter, had married a Mr. Molinari, who, despite his Italian name, was a professor of Latin and a person of the highest accomplishments. I pass over grandchildren and great-grandchildren; it is enough that my reader picture a family that is honorable, that has come down in life, and that is presided over by a heroic shade and by a daughter born in exile.

  The family lived modestly in Palermo, in what at the time was the outskirts of Buenos Aires, not far from the church of Guadalupe. Mariano still remembered having seen there, from a tramcar of the Grand National Lines, the big pond on whose shores were scattered a series of hovels, not of galvanized-iron sheets but of unplastered brick. Yesterday’s poverty was less poor than the poverty handed down to us today by industrialism. Fortunes were also much smaller then.

  The Rubios lived above a local dry-goods store. The stairway was narrow; the banister, which ran up the right-hand side, led to a longish corridor, at the end of which was a dark vestibule, where there were a coatrack and a few chairs. The vestibule opened into the small drawing room, with its upholstered furniture, and the drawing room into the dining room, with its mahogany furniture and glass-fronted china closet. The metal shutters, always kept drawn in fear of the sunlight, let a little dim twilight filter through. I recall an odor of stored away things. At the back of the house were the bedrooms, the bathroom, a small gallery with a laundry tub, and the servant’s room. In the whole house there were no books other than a volume of the poet Andrade; a short biography of the hero, with handwritten additions scribbled into the margins; and Montaner y Simón’s Hispano-American Encyclopedia, acquired on installments, together with the small set of shelves that came with it. They lived on a pension, which was never paid them punctually, and on the income from a rented property—the single remains of the once vast acreage—in Lomas de Zamora.

  At the time of my story, the elder lady lived with Julia, who was widowed, and with Julia’s son. Mrs. Jáuregui went on hating bygone tyrants—Artigas, Rosas, and Urquiza. The First World War, which made her loathe the Germans, about whom she knew very little, was less real to her than the revolution of 1890 and, needless to say, the cavalry charge at Big Hill. Since 1932, she had been growing dimmer and dimmer; common metaphors are the best because they are the only true ones. She was, of course, a Catholic, which does not necessarily mean that she believed in a God that is One and is Three, or even in an afterlife. While her hands moved over her rosary, she muttered prayers that she had never understood. In place of Easter and of Twelfth Night she had accepted Christmas, just as she had grown to accept tea instead of maté. To her, the words “Protestant,” “Jew,” “Freemason,” “heretic,” and “atheist” were synonyms and empty of meaning. While she could still talk, she spoke not of Spaniards but of godos, or Goths, just as her ancestors had done. During the Centennial, in 1910, she could hardly believe that the Spanish Infanta—who, after all, was a princess—spoke, against all expectation, like a common Spaniard and not like an Argentine lady; it was at her son-in-law’s wake that a rich relative, who had never set foot in the Jáuregui house but whose name they avidly sought in the society pages of the newspapers, gave her the disquieting news. Many of the place names that Mrs. Jáuregui used had long since been altered; she still spoke of such streets as Las Artes, Temple, Buen Orden, La Piedad, the two Calles Largas, and of the Plaza del Parque and the Portones. The family affected these archaisms, which in her were spontaneous. They spoke of “Orientales” instead of “Uruguayans.”

  Mrs. Jáuregui never went out of the house after 1921; perhaps she never suspected that Buenos Aires had been changing and growing. First memories are the most vivid. The city that she pictured beyond her front door may well have been a much earlier one than that of the time they were forced to move from the center of town out to Palermo. If so, to her the oxen that hauled wagons still rested in the square of the Once, and dead violets still spread their fragrance among the gardens of Barraeas. “Now all my dreams are of dead people” was one of the last things she was heard to say. No one had ever thought of her as a fool, but as far as I know she had never enjoyed the pleasures of the mind; the last pleasures left her would be those of memory and, later on, of forgetfulness. She had always been generous. I recall her bright, quiet eyes and her smile. Who knows what tumult of passions—now lost but which once burned—there had been in that old woman; in her day, she had been quite pleasant looking. Sensitive to plants, whose modest and silent life was so akin to her own, she looked after some begonias in her room and touched their leaves, which she could no longer see. Up until 1929, the year in which she sank into a kind of half sleep, she recounted historical happenings, but always using the same words in the same order, as if they were the Lord’s Prayer, so that I grew to suspect there were no longer any real images behind them. Even eating one thing or another was all the same to her. She was, in short, happy.

  Sleeping, as we all know, is the most secret of our acts. We devote a third of our lives to it, and yet do not understand it. For some, it is no more than an eclipse of wakefulness; for others, a more complex state spanning at one and the same time past, present, and future; for still others, an uninterrupted series of dreams. To say that Mrs. Jáuregui spent ten years in a quiet chaos is perhaps mistaken; each moment of those ten years may well have been a pure present, without a before or after. There is no reason to marvel at such a present, which we count by days and nights and by the hundreds of leaves of many calendars and by anxieties and events; it is what we go through every morning before waking up and every night before falling asleep. Twice each day, we are all the elder lady.

  The Jáuregui family lived, as we have already seen, in a somewhat false situation. They felt they belonged to the aristocracy, but the people spoken of in the society column knew nothing whatever about them; they were descendants of a founding father, but more often than not the schoolbooks overlooked him. While it is undeniable that a street bore his name, that street, known to very few people, was lost somewhere out behind the sprawling Westside cemetery.

  The fourteenth of January was drawing near.

  On the tenth, an officer in full-dress uniform delivered to the family a letter signed by the Minister of War himself, announcing his visit on the fourteenth. The Jáureguis showed the letter to the whole neighborhood and made a great deal of the engraved stationery and the signature. Then the newspapermen came. The family helped them with all available information; it was obvious that they had never heard of Colonel Rubio. People whom the family scarcely knew called by telephone so as to be invited.

  They all worked very hard for the great day. They waxed the floors, they washed the windows, they undraped the chandeliers, they polished the mahogany, they shined all the silver in the china closet, they moved the furniture around, and they opened the lid of the drawing-room piano to show off the velvet cloth that covered the keys. People came and went. A neighbor lady very kindly lent a pot of geraniums. The only person unaware of all the fuss was Mrs. Jáuregui, who, wearing a fix
ed smile, seemed not to understand a thing. Helped by the servant girl, Julia got her mother primped up as though she were already dead. The first things visitors would see on entering would be the oil portrait of the hero and, a little below it and to the right, the sword of his many battles. Even in hard times, the Jáureguis had always refused to sell the sword, thinking they would one day donate it to the Historical Museum.

  The party would begin at seven. They had set the hour for six-thirty, knowing all along that nobody likes to be the first to arrive. By ten minutes past seven, not a soul had yet appeared; the family argued somewhat nervously the advantages and disadvantages of not being punctual. Elvira, who took pride in arriving on the dot, flatly stated that it was an unpardonable discourtesy to keep others waiting. Julia, repeating what her husband had always said, was of the opinion that arriving late was a courtesy, because if everyone did so it would make things easier and that way no one would be hurrying anyone else. At seven-fifteen, the house was packed. The whole neighborhood could see and envy the automobile and chauffeur of Mrs. Figueroa, who almost never invited the Jáureguis to her house but whom they received effusively, so that nobody would guess they only saw each other once in a blue moon. The President sent his aide, an extremely polite gentleman, who said that it was a great honor for him to shake the hand of the daughter of the hero of Big Hill. The Minister, who had to leave early, read a very fine speech, in which more was said about General San Martín, however, than about Colonel Rubio. The elderly lady sat in her armchair, propped up with pillows, and from time to time nodded her head approvingly or dropped her fan. A group of distinguished ladies, the Daughters of the Republic, sang her the National Anthem, which she seemed not to hear. The photographers herded the gathering into artistic groupings and were lavish with their flashbulbs. The small glasses of sherry and port were not enough to go around. Someone uncorked a number of bottles of champagne. Mrs. Jáuregui did not utter a single word; perhaps she no longer knew who she was. From that night on, she never left her bed.

  When all the strangers had gone, the family improvised a small cold supper. The delicate perfume of incense had long since been dispelled by the odor of tobacco smoke and coffee.

  The morning and afternoon papers loyally lied, dwelling on the almost miraculous memory of the hero’s daughter, who “is an eloquent storehouse of a century of Argentine history.” Julia wanted to show her mother the clippings. In her twilit room, the elder lady lay motionless, her eyes closed. She had no fever; the doctor examined her and said that everything was as it should be. A few days later, she died. The press of so many people, the unusual clamor, the flashbulbs, the speech, the uniforms, and the repeated handshaking had hastened her end. Perhaps she believed that they were Rosas’ henchmen, who had broken into the house.

  I think back on the dead soldiers of Big Hill; I think of the nameless men of America and of Spain who met their deaths under the hooves of the horses; I think that the last victim of that throng of lances high on a Peruvian tableland was, more than a century later, a very old lady.

  Guayaquil

  Now I shall not journey to the Estado Occidental; now I shall not set eyes on snowcapped Higuerota mirrored in the waters of the Golfo Plácido; now I shall not decipher Bolívar’s manuscripts in that library, which doubtless has its own shape and its own lengthening shadows but which from here in Buenos Aires I picture in so many different ways.

  Rereading the above paragraph preparatory to writing the next, its at once melancholy and pompous tone troubles me. Perhaps one cannot speak of that Caribbean republic without, even from afar, echoing the monumental style of its most famous historian, Captain Joseph Korzeniowski—but in my case there is another reason. My opening paragraph, I suspect, was prompted by the unconscious need to infuse a note of pathos into a slightly painful and rather trivial episode. I shall with all probity recount what happened, and this may enable me to understand it. Furthermore, to confess to a thing is to leave off being an actor in it and to become an onlooker—to become somebody who has seen it and tells it and is no longer the doer.

  The actual event took place last Friday, in this same room in which I am writing, at this same—though now slightly cooler—evening hour. Aware of our tendency to forget unpleasant things, I want to set down a written record of my conversation with Dr. Edward Zimmerman, of the University of Cordoba, before oblivion blurs the details. The memory I retain of that meeting is still quite vivid.

  For the better understanding of my story, I shall have to set forth briefly the curious facts surrounding certain letters of General Bolívar’s found among the papers of Dr. José Avellanos, whose History of Fifty Years of Misrule— thought to be lost under circumstances that are only too well known—was ultimately unearthed and published by his grandson, Dr. Ricardo Avellanos. To judge from references I have collected from various sources, these letters are of no particular interest, except for one dated from Cartagena on August 13, 1822, in which the Liberator places upon record details of his celebrated meeting with the Argentine national hero General San Martín. It is needless to underscore the value of this document; in it, Bolívar reveals—if only in part—exactly what had taken place during the two generals’ interview the month before at Guayaquil. Dr. Ricardo Avellanos, embattled opponent of the government, refused to turn the correspondence over to his own country’s Academy of History, and, instead, offered it for initial publication to a number of Latin American republics. Thanks to the praiseworthy zeal of our ambassador, Dr. Melaza-Mouton, the Argentine government was the first to accept Dr. Avellanos’ disinterested offer. It was agreed that a delegate should be sent to Sulaco, the capital of the Estado Occidental, to transcribe the letters so as to see them into print upon return here. The rector of our university, in which I hold the chair of Latin American History, most generously recommended to the Minister of Education that I be appointed to carry out this mission. I also obtained the more or less unanimous vote of the National Academy of History, of which I am a member. The date of my audience with the Minister had already been fixed when it was learned that the University of Córdoba—which, I would rather suppose, knew nothing about these decisions—had proposed the name of Dr. Zimmerman.

  Reference here, as the reader may be well aware, is to a foreign-born historian expelled from his country by the Third Reich and now an Argentine citizen. Of the doubtless noteworthy body of his work, I have glanced only at a vindication of the Semitic republic of Carthage—which posterity judges through the eyes of Roman historians, its enemies—and a sort of polemical essay which holds that government should be neither visible nor emotional. This proposal drew the unanswerable refutation of Martin Heidegger, who, using newspaper headlines, proved that the modern chief of state, far from being anonymous, is rather the protagonist, the choragus, the dancing David, who acts out the drama of his people with all the pomp of stagecraft, and resorts unhesitatingly to the overstatement inherent in the art of oration. He also proved that Zimmerman came of Hebrew, not to say Jewish, stock. Publication of this essay by the venerated existentialist was the immediate cause of the banishment and nomadic activities of our guest.

  Needless to say, Zimmerman had come to Buenos Aires to speak to the Minister, who personally suggested to me, through one of his secretaries, that I see Zimmerman and, so as to avoid the unpleasant spectacle of two universities in disagreement, inform him of exactly how things stood. I of course agreed. Upon return home, I was told that Dr. Zimmerman had telephoned to announce his visit for six o’clock that same afternoon. I live, as everyone knows, on Chile Street. It was the dot of six when the bell rang.

  With republican simplicity, I myself opened the door and led him to my private study. He paused along the way to look at the patio; the black and white tiles, the two magnolias, and the wellhead stirred him to eloquence. He was, I believe, somewhat ill at ease. There was nothing out of the ordinary about him. He must have been forty or so, and seemed to have a biggish head. His eyes were hidden by dark glass
es, which he once or twice left on the table, then snatched up again. When we first shook hands, I remarked to myself with a certain satisfaction that I was the taller, and at once I was ashamed of myself, for this was not a matter of a physical or even a moral duel but was simply to be an explanation of where things stood. I am not very observant—if I am observant at all—but he brought to mind what a certain poet has called, with an ugliness that matches what it defines, an “immoderate sartorial inelegance.” I can still see garments of electric blue, with too many buttons and pockets. Zimmerman’s tie, I noticed, was one of those conjuror’s knots held in place by two plastic clips. He carried a leather portfolio, which I presumed was full of documents. He wore a short military moustache, and when in the course of our talk he lit a cigar I felt that there were too many things on that face. Trop meublé, I said to myself.

  The successiveness of language—since every word occupies a place on the page and a moment in the reader’s mind—tends to exaggerate what we are saying; beyond the visual trivia that I have listed, the man gave the impression of having experienced an arduous life.